FPGAs and VITA 41 address mil sensor processing design challenges

VITA Technologies (VME and Critical Systems) — August 13, 2005

Military sensors for applications, such as radar and sonar, spew enough data to overwhelm most systems. Not only must the data be collected at the front end, but also it must be moved into and around the system and digitally signal processed before it is of any value. The challenges of aggregating the data at the front end, processing it, and finally distributing it are considerably eased by using parallel processing in FPGAs. Additionally, new open VME standards, for instance VITA 41, support multi-gigabyte serial communications schemes such as RapidIO, InfiniBand, Ethernet, and PCI Express, while offering new architectures for in-line processing and multi-processing.